After we spent the first day of the PA rifle season hunting a couple of big bucks that Petey knew of with no success, OlSpark and I decided to spend Saturday on the mountain. Fresh snow, a little colder weather, and some people out hunting led us to believe we would have a great opportunity at finding a good buck to take from long range.

It took quite awhile to find our first deer of the day. Hard to believe when we can see so much from where we were set up. We could literally see 2 miles of mountain side in front of us and almost that much behind us and to our right. Even so, it was well after 9 when I finally found a lone doe standing in the open feeding. Soon after that, I noticed that she was running, being chased actually by another deer but I lost sight of them behind a large stand of hemlocks. It took another 20 minutes before we found them, or at least what we thought was them.

The first deer was a buck....ranged at 1050 on the Leica Geovids. The only bad news was through the big eyes, we could clearly tell that this deer was only a 3 point. He had a fork on his right side, with a nice clean beam on the left. Certainly not the deer we were looking for. The second deer we had first written off as the doe, but then I noticed a 3rd deer up the hill acting really squirrely....

The second deer that was standing beside the buck turned slightly and I caught a glimpse of horn. Sure enough I picked out spikes about 3" long or so. (they were about 1/2 the height of his ears) The third deer turned out to be the doe and from over 1000 yards away, Olspark and I got to watch a very low budget buck fight.

The littler guy tried to shove the other around but I'm afraid his head gear was just not helping him much. Soon they lost interest, and they all disappeared into the hemlock stand where we couldn't see them.

Those were the only 3 deer of the day that we spotted. But even these deer though certainly not on our hit list kept us entertained and made the day one to remember and certainly a success.

Good Luck to all the hunters and keep pressing on! I'll be on the mountain again, looking for a good deer to drop the hammer on.